Clickbait-iest headline of the year award?

Well, who among us wouldn't want to grow their retirement account by an order of magnitude? Or two? Or three? Or more? Or even by, say, 300,000 percent. 300,ooo percent, huh? Tell me more!

Thus, I eagerly clicked on the Wapo bait and to read an article with the title "The simple tricks that turned one investor’s $70,000 retirement account into a $264 million fortune."

Simple tricks? Tell me even more! 

And so I set out, yellow notepad and rollerball pen in hand, so I could take notes and not miss a trick when it came to those simple tricks.

Friends, would it surprise you to learn that by the time I finished that article, my yellow notepad had nary a jot or tittle on it? 

Alas, it's true. There are, in fact, no simple tricks to turning $70K into $264M. 

Instead, the story chronicled the amazeballs success that one Ted Weschler, a "low-profile money manager", without actually revealing much by way of easy-peasy, smarty-pants tips. 

 Weschler isn't just any old "low profile money manager." He’s a helpmate of Warren Buffet, for whom he keeps an eye on a whole bundle of Berkshire loot. His personal retirement account is a sideline.

Overall, his wisdom comes down to the same advice that most of us give ourselves, even if we’re not quite as assiduous as Weschler is when it comes to following our own advice.

...save and invest, early and often, and take advantage of any retirement account benefits offered by their employer. (Source: WaPo)

Accruing his fortune was also helped by converting his plain vanilla IRA to a Roth nearly a decade ago. For Roth’s, you pay the taxes upfront, rather than when you withdraw your money.

Such transactions weren’t available to high-income people like Weschler until 2010 when legislation (intended in part to pay for prolonging some of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts) waived the income limits on IRA- to- Roth conversions.

Converting to a Roth from a regular IRA cost Weschler serious money on his 2012 taxes — but he won’t have to pay the IRS anything when he takes money out of his Roth. This means that down the road, he’ll save lots more tax than he paid nine years ago…He acknowledges the policy challenges that presents.

“Although I have been an enormous beneficiary of the IRA mechanism, I personally do not feel the tax shield afforded me by my IRA is necessarily good tax policy,” he wrote. “To this end, I am openly supportive of modifying the benefit afforded to retirement accounts once they exceed a certain threshold.”

So, if Weschler had his druthers, rich folks couldn’t do the Roth conversion thang. But us little guys would be. That is, if we could afford to do so. Of course, one of the attractions of saving in an IRA is that you don’t pay taxes on your contribution, which makes it a lot easier to make it.

Anyway, Weschler's simple tricks - save often and early, do a  Roth - aren't going to build any astronomical fortune for you.

Weschler’s career has been in investing (hedge fund, leveraged buyout fund), so he spends a lot of time researching and thinking about investments. He's a smart guy. And he cautions that those of us who don’t have his time and talent to keep an eye on individual investment instruments should keep our IRA dough in index funds. Which, of course, so many of us do, and thus we get the “chug along” returns we get – admittedly pretty good of late – but not the crazy-money returns that Weschler has achieved. If he’d invested that $70K IRA in an index fund he’d have a lot less. With Vanguard, he’d have accrued a modest $1.6M.

The story of how he met Buffett is an interesting one:

In 2010, Weschler, a long time Buffett admirer, entered and won the annual auction run by the Glide Memorial Church of San Francisco to have a lunch with Buffett by making a $2,626,311 donation. He also won the 2011 auction by bidding $100 more.

Rather than join Buffett for high-profile lunches in New York City, Weschler flew to Buffett’s hometown of Omaha to dine at a since-closed steakhouse called Picolo’s.

These two lunches, which Weschler says lasted about four hours each, resulted in Buffett offering Weschler a job.

Weschler, by the way, has done just fine for Buffett Berkshire. It’s just that he does a lot better for his own IRA, where he can take greater risk and swing for further fences.

Anyway, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know – other than that maybe I should have done some Roth conversion at some point, especially given that the market’s been doing well by me of late. Not that it would make that much of a difference. I’m not exactly a high roller with a rich-guy tax rate.

Bottom line: there’s no simple trick to growing your IRA by 300,000 percent. You need to be smart, canny, tough,persistent, and lucky. There is no “everyone can do it” strategy. The “everyone can do it strategy” is start building your IRA early on, stick it in an index fund, play the long game (lean into equities - be bullish - when you’re young), and you’ll be able to have a more comfortable if somewhat modest retirement.

Didn’t need to read this clickbait article to know that.